The Prime Directive

One of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our times is what to do about the plight of women oppressed by ultra-traditional cultures in countries we are  allied with.  Amnesty International reports today that a young Afghan woman was beheaded by her own mother-in-law for refusing to serve as a prostitute.  The mother-in-law and other relatives freely admit it.  Last week a Pakistani girl was shot for publicly expressing her desire to get an education. These and other equally repugnant cases are known to be common, not exceptions, in areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It is both a difficult moral issue and an extremely complex question about appropriate relations between unlike cultures.  Star Trek years ago invented the “Prime Directive”, the mandate never to interfere with the workings of an alien culture, no matter how repugnant, as a governing principle.  The Prime Directive places highest value on toleration.  It is also a statement that all morals are relative to the culture in which they are embedded, a much less intuitively obvious assertion.  Something in us says ”yes” to the Prime Directive, recognizing our lack of right to change without consent what another culture has worked out over centuries only because it seems wrong to us.  Yet something in us also recognizes our common humanity across cultural boundaries, and is rightly unwilling to tolerate arguable depravity.

It was easy for early Spanish Conquistadors in the new world; they abolished human sacrifice without hesitation simply on the grounds that any practice so variant from their own moral standards must not be allowed to continue.  The fact that they themselves were beating slaves to death appalled only a few. Toleration was not a part of their worldview; failure to recognize the common humanity of people of other cultures was.  Many at that time believed new world peoples had no souls.  For us, it is somewhat easy in the face of oppression to reason that the best we can do is to quickly withdraw financial aid to the oppressors and depart.  But what if doing so is in conflict with our national strategic interests?

Our traditional guiding principle – our “prime directive” - is that decided in the Treaty of Westphalia, back in 1648, that each nation has ultimate authority, based on its own religious and moral values, to determine its laws and internal behavior – “To him who is sovereign, his own religion.”  That was fine in a common European culture where beheadings for not being a prostitute were unthinkable for all.  Our world is both much wider and smaller today, and no Westphalian principles govern the many nations with which we must interact.  Yet we also know also that imposition of Sharia legal principles in the U.S., despite their being the norm among many other nations, would be alien to us; shutting an eye to perceived moral excesses elsewhere becomes the preferred norm everywhere.

We need to keep two things in mind.  First, no nation, neither we nor Afghanistan, is a monolith. Just as we share room for many widely divergent values, some of them violently expressed (a shot at an Obama campaign office?), so do other nations. Strategic interests are worked out between governments, but moral interests must be worked out between people. I’m sure many Afghanis and Pakistanis are as repelled as we are at the atrocities taking place in their homelands. Second, if we support our own legal and moral principles, we have an obligation to make it known.  Silent withdrawal is itself a form of consent.  I’ve mentioned the legal principle we have that no one can be required to serve as conduit for the free expression of another.  That principle can be broadened to the international scene.  We need to strengthen our use of public diplomacy, through the voices of diplomats, use of Voice of America, etc., to make it clear how unhappy we are with such atrocity and unwilling to support its continuance, financially or otherwise.  We need to emphasize that we believe the principle recently recognized by the U.N. of “Responsibility to Protect” extends to a nation’s protection of its people against such atrocities through passage and enforcement of laws.  But to withdraw from the scene only supports the agendas of those wishing us to be gone anyway.  There are well-intentioned people in each country begging for our support, and we need to provide it.  There are basic human rights that are beyond any particular culture, and need expression.  We owe it to ourselves and to the world to be an active voice in conveying them everywhere.